Increasingly the military, law enforcement agencies and civilian operators use unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) for reconnaissance, surveillance, search and enhanced situational awareness. Typically, a UAV is tasked by a ground control system that is operated by an operator. Data are exchanged between the UAV and the ground control system during any given mission using telemetry.
Wider adoption of UAVs for such tasks depends upon many factors. Those factors include, for example, ease and speed of deployment, the number of operators required to fly the UAV, the weight of the Unmanned Air System (UAS) of which the UAV is a part, including the ground control station and/or associated power supplies and payloads, the size of the vehicle, whether or not further equipment is required to launch the vehicle and the complexity of the vehicle; the latter clearly influencing the ease and speed of deployment.
The above factors influence the suitability of a UAV for a given task. Some situations demand that a UAV is deployed and on task, that is, performing, or at least being en route to, the task for which it was deployed, in as short a time frame as practicable.
It is an object of embodiments of the present invention at least to mitigate one or more of the above problems.